Brazen Figure May Hold Key to Mysteries

CAIRO — Ahmed Abu Khattala was always open about his animosity toward the United States, and even about his conviction that Muslims and Christians were locked in an intractable religious war. “There is always hostility between the religions,” he said in an interview. “That is the nature of religions.”

Afterward, he offered contradictory denials of his role, sometimes trying to say that he did not do it but strongly approved. He appeared to enjoy his notoriety.

Even after President Obama vowed to hunt down the attackers, Mr. Abu Khattala sat for repeated interviews with Western journalists and even invited a correspondent for tea in the modest home where he lived openly, with his mother, in the el-Leithi neighborhood of Benghazi.

But for all his brazenness, Mr. Abu Khattala also holds many tantalizing secrets for the Americans still investigating and debating the attack.

Captured by military commandos and law enforcement agents early on Monday, Mr. Abu Khattala may now help address some of the persistent questions about the identity and motives of the attackers. The thriving industry of conspiracy theories, political scandals, talk show chatter and congressional hearings may now confront the man federal investigators say played the central role in the attack.

Despite extensive speculation about the possible role of Al Qaeda in directing the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala is a local, small-time Islamist militant. He has no known connections to international terrorist groups, say American officials briefed on the criminal investigation and intelligence reporting, and other Benghazi Islamists and militia leaders who have known him for many years.

In several hours of interviews since the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala was happy to profess his admiration for Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda. He insisted that American foreign policy alone was to blame for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But he remained a distant admirer of Mr. Bin Laden’s organization, having spent most of his adult life in and out of jail for his extremism under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Even by the standards of Benghazi jihadists — and even among many of his friends — Mr. Abu Khattala stands out as both erratic and extremist. “Even in prison, he was always alone,” said Sheikh Mohamed Abu Sidra, an Islamist member of Parliament from Benghazi who spent several years in prison with Mr. Abu Khattala.

“He is sincere, but he is very ignorant, and I don’t think he is 100 percent mentally fit,” Mr. Abu Sidra said. “I always ask myself, how did he become a leader?”

When the revolt against Colonel Qaddafi broke out in February 2011, however, Mr. Abu Khattala’s years in prison were an attractive credential to the young men looking for tough-talking “sheikhs” to follow into battle.

He formed a militia of perhaps two dozen fighters, naming it Obeida Ibn Al Jarra for an early Islamic general. But by the summer, Mr. Abu Khattala and his band had become notorious across Benghazi.

A group of Islamist militia leaders decided to “arrest” and investigate the main rebel commander, Gen. Abdul Fattah Younes, who had also become NATO’s preferred partner among the rebel leaders. His captors held him overnight in the headquarters of Mr. Abu Khattala’s brigade, and General Younes’s body was found the next day on a roadside, riddled with bullets.

Mr. Abu Khattala “became a boogeyman” across Benghazi, said Mohamed al-Gharabi, the Islamist leader of the Rafallah al-Sehati Brigade. “People started to fear him,” he said.

Mr. Abu Khattala appeared to enjoy his new infamy. When the Islamist-dominated militias reorganized into a centralized coalition, he rejected it as insufficiently Islamist. Complaining that the coalition supported the Western-backed provisional government instead of demanding a theocracy, he pulled back from the front.

“He thinks he owns God and everyone else is an infidel,” said Fawzi Bukatef, the coalition’s former leader.

In the period before the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala was living in el-Leithi, known for its high concentration of militant extremists. He made his living as a building contractor in blue Dickies coveralls. But he was still active with a small, part-time militia, which at certain times over the last two years controlled at least one checkpoint on a highway near Benghazi.

On the day of the attack, Islamists in Cairo had staged a demonstration outside the United States Embassy there to protest an American-made online video mocking Islam, and the protest culminated in a breach of the embassy’s walls — images that flashed through news coverage around the Arab world.

As the attack in Benghazi was unfolding a few hours later, Mr. Abu Khattala told fellow Islamist fighters and others that the assault was retaliation for the same insulting video, according to people who heard him.

Video

President Obama said that Ahmed Abu Khattala, suspected of being the ringleader in the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, was being transported to the United States.CreditCreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

In an interview a few days later, he pointedly declined to say whether an offensive online video might indeed warrant the destruction of the diplomatic mission or the killing of the ambassador. “From a religious point of view, it is hard to say whether it is good or bad,” he said.

Several witnesses to the attack later said that Mr. Abu Khattala’s presence and leadership were conspicuous from the start. He initially hung back, standing near the crowd at Venezia Road, several witnesses said. But a procession of fighters hurried to him out of the smoke and gunfire, addressed him as “sheikh,” and then gave him reports or took his orders before plunging back into the compound.

Spotting him as the central figure in the attack, a local official, Anwar el-Dos, approached Mr. Abu Khattala for help in entering the compound. The two men drove into the mission together in Mr. Abu Khattala’s pickup truck, witnesses said. As the men moved forward, the fighters parted to let them pass.

When the truck doors opened inside the walls, witnesses said, Mr. Dos dived to the ground to avoid gunfire ringing all around. But Mr. Abu Khattala strolled coolly through the chaos.

“He was just calm as could be,” a young Islamist who had joined the pillaging said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Mr. Abu Khattala showed up on internal security cameras at about 11:30 p.m., according to American officials who have viewed the footage.

A short time later, Mr. Abu Khattala drove to the headquarters of Ansar al-Shariah, a local Benghazi militia whose members, witnesses said, also played a prominent role in the attack.

Although widely seen at the attack, Mr. Abu Khattala made no attempt to flee. The safest place for him may have been Benghazi, where Libya’s weak central government feared exerting its authority because of the superior power of the local Islamist militias.

Mr. Abu Khattala’s neighbors and other residents of Benghazi were apparently unaware of his capture, perhaps because they assumed he was caught up in other fighting in the city. A renegade general has been waging a local campaign against Islamist militants such as those in Ansar al-Shariah and Mr. Abu Khattala.

In interviews after the news emerged, two Benghazi residents said they had last seen Mr. Abu Khattala on Sunday. A neighbor in the el-Leithi district said he had seen Mr. Abu Khattala leaving his house alone in an Afghan-style jallabiya, with a Kalashnikov rifle slung over one shoulder and a Belgian FN rifle over the other.

“Then he walked deep into el-Leithi,” the neighbor said. “We haven’t seen him since.”

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Brazen Figure May Hold Key To Mysteries. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe